This
exhibition is a viewfinder trained onto the specific sites of
the cultural fabric of New York City. The past, represented by
the memory imprint of an artistic activity that occurred at a
certain site, is “covered” by a current artwork focused
on the same site. Through this double take, the past and the present
collapse onto each other on a city map. Our intention is to draw
precise and living connections between artists, their work, and
environments across times — the strands of such connections
weave the fabric of the exhibition.

An itinerary drawn from the
mind to the street, from time to time, has become the AVANT-GUIDE
TO NYC. It began as a map of one
art-historically inclined mind; as others took it to their special
places, it expanded to cartography of linked minds. In fact,
it only approaches the “historical” through this
database of shared content. The history presented in this project
remains amateur — that is, a creative history. It may even
be faulty. However, by virtue of it being in the process of its
own making, it would always be the right one for any given moment.
It is neither complete nor comprehensive. It can be finished
at any time, and then unfinished again. It befits an exhibition
that displays its own making.

Earlier history was involved in
reconstruction of the past. Nowadays, new information lands on
the Web every second, while old information is being saved and
updated; unilateral Websurfers across the globe burrow through
it and inject jolts of personal content along their paths, resuscitating
bits of history. As virtual and real traces become enmeshed in
this ever-expanding living archive, what are the possibilities
that the present will forever replace the past — that
time will be continuous, as long as it lasts? An interface of
history may come to resemble the Freudian mind as described in
Civilization and Its Discontents, “in which nothing once
constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development
had survived alongside the latest.”

How many maps may be
drawn to deal with a given space? Henri Lefebvre puts a number
at “instant infinity.” Andrea
Geyer designs
a loving map of NYC sightings of likenesses in bronze and stone
of model Audrey Munson (1891–1996) — her life is
documented in Geyer’s book, Queen
of the Artist’s
Studios. Kabir
Carter generated an acoustic survey of electronic music and sound,
which takes us to Max Neuhaus’ Times Square, The Loft,
Paradise Garage, Continental Baths, and The Gallery era dance
floors, presented in the form of an open-ended archive where
documentation and composition merge — Soho
Versus Disco.
Ward Shelley has been mapping various art worlds in his idiosyncratic,
hand-drawn diagrams, including Specific Sites of this project.
Dexter Sinister created the useful map for this brochure. There
are others — for example, this
one on Google
Maps.

Directions, anyone? Going about our daily business in
the city, we navigate among the interconnected pasts and presents
of people, places, and events. Marcel Duchamp’s studio,
Peggy Guggenheim’s
Art of This Century, and Group Material — where are these
places, and what are their current functions? Visits to many
notable addresses prove that their mystique is only imaginary.
On the other hand, a personal experience occurring at any place
whatever can result in the personal and non-historical becoming
shared and quasi-historical via the memory imprint in the artist’s
work — such
as when a stranger jumps out the window of the apartment building
where Nina Katchadourian also happens to live; or when industrial
towers in Brooklyn explode symmetrically to the WTC towers, with
the symmetry established through Julieta Aranda’s studio
window. As John Cage observed, as memories get disconnected from
experiences that produced them, then “each thing that we
see is new, as though we have become tourists and we’re
living in countries that are very exciting, because we don’t
know them.” As spaces get dislodged from their predetermined
coordinates, they become transformed into what Henri Lefebvre
termed representational spaces, embodying complex symbolisms — sometimes
coded, sometimes not — linked to the clandestine or underground
side of social life and art. Art praxis, acting in this
potential space, re-forms the social space. Fluidity between
the social and the personal allows us to locate the known and
unknown places of the mind on the city map.

On December 3rd, 1919, Marcel Duchamp wrote a check to his dentist
for $115 from The Teeth’s Loan & Trust Company, Consolidated,
located at 2 Wall Street (1). In 1942, he rented a studio on
the fourth floor of an apartment building, 210 West 14th Street
(2). In 1965, he got another studio at 80 East 11th Street 4th
floor, Suite 403 (3), where he secretly worked on Étant
Donnés:
1° la chute d’eau 2° le gaz d’éclairage...
all the while keeping the other studio to support his claim that
the artist is not working.

Upon her return to New York in 1942,
Peggy Guggenheim rented two adjacent tailor shops on the top
floor of 30 West 57th Street (4), which she and the architect
Frederick Kiesler converted into The Art of This Century museum
and gallery. For her residence, Peggy rented a triplex apartment
in a townhouse at Beekman Place, 153/155 East 61st Street (5).
She commissioned Jackson Pollock to paint a Mural for the lobby,
which did not fit; when summoned to help with the installation,
Duchamp cut 8” off the canvas — a
myth that Francis V. O’Connor has, unfortunately, repudiated.
On their arrival to New York City, John and Xenia Cage were put
up at Peggy’s house. After the break up of their marriage,
John Cage rented a loft at a tenement building, now demolished,
at 236 Monroe Street, known as Bozza Mansion (6). Isamu Noguchi
said, “An old shoe would look beautiful in this room.” Eckhard
Etzold rebuilt the space in 3D on the computer and painted it
on canvas—Monroe Street 236. In the 1980s Cage and Merce
Cunningham moved to the loft at 625 West Sixth Avenue (7) where
they lived until they died — Cage in 1992, Merce in 2009:
http://johncagetrust.blogspot.com

When Robert Rauschenberg’s
downtown loft at 128 Front Street (8) was being fumigated for
bedbugs, he stayed at Cage’s
loft on Monroe, and made a painting as a gift. When Rauschenberg
moved out of Front Street studio, Öyvind Fahlström
and Barbro Östlihn moved in, with the help of Billy Klüver,
a fellow Swede who made technology a part of art. Anna Lundh
recently joined the Swedish diaspora in New York and retraced Östlihn’s
photographically recorded movements around the city — Front-Time
Reworkings (framtid, normally translated from Swedish as “future,” literally
translates as “front-time”).

Apart from the visual
landmarks that help us navigate through space, there are other
markers such as sounds and smells. Max Neuhaus took his audiences
on field trips through Consolidated Edison Power Stations and
Hudson Tubes, and stamped their hands with the word LISTEN. Angel
Nevarez & Valerie Tevere walk through these environments
while listening to new sounds in their LISTEN de novo: Field
Trips Thru Sound Environments (1966/2010).

Yoko Ono and La Monte
Young organized concerts of new music and performance events
in 1960–61, entitled Chambers Street Loft
Series in Ono’s cold water flat on the top floor of 112
Chambers Street (9). Their program overlapped with exhibitions
and events presented by George Maciunas at AG Gallery uptown,
at 925 Madison Avenue (10), where Ono had her first solo show.
The gallery’s
name is made up from the first initials of the founders’s
first names (“Almus” and “George”), and
incidentally also stands for “Avant-Garde.” Maciunas
himself, having sold derelict lofts to many artists through his
real estate company in the largely abandoned manufacturing area
that has become SoHo, lived at 349 West Broadway (11).

Artists
from various fields met under the roof of Judson Church, which
housed Judson Dance Theater in the basement and Judson Gallery
in the adjacent space with entrance at 239 Thompson Street (12).
Allan Kaprow directed the gallery in 1959, where he presented
first environments with performances by Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg.

The
same year, Kaprow had his first public showing of happenings
at the Reuben Gallery, 44 East 3rd Street (13), after developing
the form in Cage’s class at the New School for Social Research.
Happenings soon exploded on the New York art scene, moving uptown
in 1961 with Kaprow’s Yard to be installed at the Martha
Jackson Gallery, 32 East 69th Street (14), which remains a gallery
to this day; and Words at Smolin Gallery, 19 East 71st Street
(15). Kaprow’s work with words as things that happen in
space, differently every time, opened up possibilities for interpretations
of his works by other artists. Pia Lindman knitted Kaprow’s
words in 3-D patterns with colorful wool yarns, situated them
in a three-dimensional space, and performed BOOM CRASH! with
her own body — body language, dressed in space.

Applications
of text to the body and the resulting translations are key to
the works of both Ono and Vito Acconci, whom Xaviera Simmons
connects through her own, self-inscribed use of language and
body. She reads, writes, views, and performs aspects of their
scores within and outside the original sites, including Sonnabend
Gallery at 420 West Broadway (16) and the basement at 93 Grand
Street (17) — Situation, Activity and Records, General
Circumstances and Specific Circumstances (Someone To Cling To):
Looking at Works by Yoko Ono and Vito Acconci.

Many artists detoured
from happenings toward solitary activities or the market. Oldenburg
opened The Store at 107 East 2nd Street (18), where he made and
sold baked potatoes, hamburgers, women’s
legs, etc. He also wrote plays and staged them in the backroom
on weekends. Friends performed and attended.

The storefront sensibility
flourished in the East Village in the 1980s, with so many galleries
opening, closing, and moving around the neighborhood. Gracie
Mansion had an eponymous gallery at 15 St Mark’s Place
(19) and then at 337 East 10th Street (20), among other locations. caraballo-farman
followed her to these addresses (one of which is a restaurant,
another a knick-knack shop) and shared in the new functions of
these places — KNOCK
KNOCK WHO’S THERE: Gracie Mansion Revisited.

Violent swaying
between “high” and “low” took
artists to the South Bronx, where Stefan Eins opened Fashion
Moda in 1978, at 2803 Third Avenue (21). Hatuey Ramos-Fermin
refashioned both highs and lows in his exhibition at the site
(now occupied by On Time Security Guard Training School), where
the painted plaster cast of the school’s owner, Craig Howard,
made by John Ahearn for this occasion, now hangs.

Swapping spatial
functions goes both ways, as demonstrated in the most curious
relocation of Kim’s Video from 124 First Avenue
(22) to Salemi in southwest Sicily. Kim’s, which lost business
because of on-line video rentals and sales, embodied the alternative
crossover spirit of Gracie Mansion, Fashion Moda, and, more recently,
e-flux — a spirit that the mayor of Salemi hopes to transplant
to his city. Katya Sander investigates the possibilities of such
import/export in her Drama, Horror, Science Fiction, Experimental,
Etc.

“Where to go from here?”, John Cage asked
in 1957, and answered, “Towards theater. That art more
than music resembles nature.” The reclamation of the theater
of the everyday in the 1960s was fueled, on the one hand, by
the desire to get back in touch with the mystical, and on the
other hand, by the emerging activism of the street. The first
tendency, apparent in happenings, also led to cultish associations,
such as the Sullivan Institute, located at 314 West 91st Street
(23) and 79 East 4th Street (24). Pablo Helguera will stage the
play, The Conditions of Halcyon, in the former Sullivan space,
now occupied by the New York Theater Workshop. Alternately, such
tendencies facilitated the performative realization of identity
in gay clubs frequented by artists and theorists, including Robert
Mapplethorpe and Michel Foucault — the non-public places
of shared jouissance such as The Mineshaft at 835 Washington
Street (25) that Carlos Motta revisits in A Brief History of
Leather and S&M Bars, Clubs,
and Stories in New York City.

The increasingly blurred boundaries
between the public and private activities of the gallery evolved
it into a space for gathering, performance, and sharing food.
Gordon Matta-Clark, with friends, opened the co-op Food in 1971
at 127 Prince Street (26). Communality nourished the potential
for protest, which manifested in Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” and
its many variations —“Anarchy Torture,” “An
Arctic Lecture,” “Anarchy Lecture,” and “An
Art Collector.” Alex Villar conflates Matta-Clark’s
anarchitectural Window Blow-Out, 1976, with more recent scenes
of economic protesters breaking through the glass plate windows
of stores and banks, and performs Broken Window at the Lucky
Brand store on Prince Street, the former site of Food.

Around
the corner, Joseph Beuys shared food and a cage with a coyote
at René Block Gallery, 157 Spring Street (27). Like Block,
other international curators, writers, and art entrepreneurs
found gallery space and alternative space to be nearly interchangeable
in the 1970s. Seth Siegelaub pushed toward the dematerialization
of art from his gallery at 44 East 52nd Street (28). In the meantime,
Alanna Heiss appropriated derelict city-owned spaces and remade
them into art spaces forever: Coney Island Sculpture Factory;
Idea Warehouse at 22 Reade Street (29); Clocktower Gallery at
346 Broadway (30), and PS1. Nancy Hwang asked Heiss to
retrace her moves that led to the new radio venture, transmitted
from the old Clocktower.

Several, mostly artist-curator-run galleries
continued this double trajectory of “conceptually alternative” since
the 1980s — Group Material in the Village, 244 East
13th Street (31); American Fine Arts in SoHo, 40 and 22 Wooster
Street (32); Thread Waxing Space, 476 Broadway (33); The Wrong
Gallery, 516A1/2 West 20th Street in Chelsea (34); Orchard on
the Lower East Side, 47 Orchard Street (35), and others still
in operation.

Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it
is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval
slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future:
the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally
small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when
nothing is happening. It is the void between events.

George Kubler’s
The Shape of Time, 1962, joins Dexter Sinister’s
Watch Scan 1200 dpi, 2009, on the announcement for this exhibition.